How to Change Dock Stacks Icon Size in Grid View of OS X

Stacks are a Dock feature in Mac OS X which allows for an easy way to see the contents of Applications, Documents, Downloads, and whatever other folder placed into the Dock. There are a few different ways to view the Stacks, which appear on the right side of the Mac Dock, like grid, automatic, list, fan, etc. This trick will allow you to quickly change the icon size of those icons when in the “Grid” view of Stacks.

Before you’ll be able to change the icon size of Stacks, the stack you are adjusting must be shown as a “Grid”. Change this by selecting a Stack with a right-click (like the Applications stack) and choosing the Grid option.

Now you can adjust the icon sizes of those Grid Stacks with the following simple keystrokes, you must have the Grid Stack opened in the Dock of OS X to have these work to change icon size as intended.

Command + to increase the icon size of Dock Grid Stacks icons

Command – to decrease the icon size of Grid stack icons

Size adjustment is made immediately and can be set anywhere from one extreme of huge, to small, or anywhere in between. Just hit the appropriate keystroke and watch as the change takes place live, repeatedly hitting the keystroke will make the adjustment more extreme.

Here is an example of huge Dock Stack icons:

And here is an example of smaller Dock Stack icons in grid view:

Hopefully a similar feature will be implemented for Launchpad, which is currently stuck at a single size, although it can be modified to be slightly smaller.

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Ok, but what if I want to reduce a number of icons to display. By default I have 90 icons in the grid view of my Download folder in Dock, how can I reduce that number so that I can scroll instead of viewing all of 90 items which takes about 40% of the entire screen?